Ian F. Akyildiz (born İlhan Fuat Akyıldız on April 11, 1954) is a Turkish-American electrical engineer who is the President and CTO of the Truva Inc since March 1989. He retired from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech in 2021 after almost 35 years service as Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications and Chair of the Telecom group.
He serves on the advisory board of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates since June 1, 2020. He is also an adjunct professor with the University of Helsinki since 2021, University of Iceland since 2020, and University of Cyprus since 2017.
Akyildiz was the Megagrant Research Leader and Advisor to the Director of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, Russia, (2018–2020). He is the Ken Byers Chair Professor Emeritus in Telecommunications, Past Chair of the Telecom group at the ECE and the Director of the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology (1985–2020). He founded the N3Cat (NanoNetworking Center) at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, in Barcelona, Spain, in 2008.
His research interests are in 6G/7G, Wireless Systems, TeraHertz Communication, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces, Nanonetworks, Internet of Space Things/CUBESATs, Internet of BioNanoThings, Molecular Communication and Underwater Communication. According to Google Scholar as of April 2023, his h-index is 135 and the total number of citations to his papers is 140+K.
Research contributions Queueing Network Models Akyildiz started his research work on queueing networks models in the early 1980s. His PhD thesis (1984) was entitled “Multiprocessor Systems with Process Communication” where he developed queuing network models to analyze the performance of the multiprocessor systems which were important subject in the early 1980s. In particular, he developed queueing network models for process communication where the buffers were finite and blocking/losses of messages could occur.
His paper was the first which was an original work introducing the duality of the state spaces of queueing networks with blocking/finite buffers versus queueing networks without blocking kind of mapping of state space to each other, and accordingly obtaining exact product form solution for two nodes. Based on this novel duality concept, Akyildiz showed in an approximate duality (mapping) of state spaces between queuing networks with and without blocking having arbitrary number of nodes. He then derived the approximate throughput formula and also derived approximate product form solutions in.
ATM and Wireless ATM Networks In 1997, Akyildiz with his colleagues at the YURIE systems designed and implemented the first adaptive forward-error-correction solution on the link layer of their wireless ATM switch providing high reliability in wireless ATM networks with very low bit data rates used in battlefield scenarios. A patent for this solution was obtained in 2006 .
A technical paper describing the link layer design on this low bit rate wireless ATM switch was published. The founder of the Yurie Systems, Jeong H. Kim, received the entrepreneur of the year award in 1997 and Yurie Systems was acquired by Lucent for 1 Billion US Dollars in 1998.
Mobility Management in 2G and 3G Cellular Systems Akyildiz significantly contributed to mobility and resource management of 2G and 3G cellular systems in the 90s. He proposed many handoff management, location registration, and paging schemes for the design of 3G and 4G wireless systems, and all of his papers have been published in top notch journals and conferences between 1998 and 2000.
His paper titled “Mobility Management in Next-Generation Wireless Systems” was invited to be included in Proceedings of IEEE, and is the most cited paper on mobility management in the literature, and became “the” main reading material for the first course on mobile networks in many universities. His contributions to mobility and resource management gained him the ACM Fellow rank in 1997.
4G Wireless Systems and Mobility/Resource Management Akyildiz started to use the notion “4G” wireless networks in 1999-2000 through his papers and keynote speeches. He pointed out the requirements for heterogeneous 4G wireless systems, such as anywhere/anytime wireless connectivity with hundreds of Mbps bandwidth per mobile user for both data and multimedia services. Consequently, the first adaptive protocol suite framework for Next Generation Wireless Internet was supported by NSF (National Science Foundation) (2000–2005) NSF #:ANI-0117840.
The culmination of his research work on this topic gained him the 2003 ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award for his "pioneering contributions in the area of mobility and resource management for wireless communication networks", in September 2003.
Satellite and HALO (High Altitude Low Orbit) Communication Akyildiz, in collaboration and with support of NASA, developed several routing algorithms and a novel transport control protocol called TCP Peach to realize practical satellite networks. He significantly contributed towards the development and realization of high altitude long operation (HALO) networks for providing broadband wireless network access which was implemented by Angel Technologies and Raytheon, exploited by invention disclosures () and ).
His paper is the first to comprehensively put forward the design principles and system reference model for HALO networks, which is a broadband wireless metropolitan area network with a star topology, whose solitary hub is located in the atmosphere above the service area at an altitude higher than commercial airline traffic.
Wireless Sensor Networks With the publication of a roadmap paper on wireless sensor networks, Akyildiz made this research area known. This publication has received more than 41,000 citations in 20 years. This paper received the best tutorial paper award from IEEE Communications society in 2003.
Akyildiz published many pioneering papers on wireless sensor networks. For example, in the first reliable protocol (Event-to-Sink Reliable Transport -ESRT-) was introduced specifically tailored for the unique requirements and characteristics of wireless sensor networks. ESRT was devised based on the extremely novel and yet practical engineering notion of event-to-sink reliability, which leverages the inherent redundancy and spatio-temporal correlation in sensor networks to maximize the network lifetime. ESRT has also been taught in undergraduate and graduate level wireless networking courses at many universities. This work has been implemented in several simulation tools.
The pioneering contributions to the field of wireless sensor networks was recognized as the IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award 2011.
Wireless Sensor Networks in challenged environments Akyildiz was one of the first to introduce several advanced and next generation wireless sensor network paradigms and architectures to the research community including sensor and actor networks, multimedia sensor networks, underwater acoustic sensor networks, wireless underground sensor networks, underground magnetic sensor networks, along with the comprehensive list of open research issues and the first novel communication techniques.
Preliminary version of this paper received the best paper award from IEEE GlobeCom 2009 conference.
Cognitive Radio Networks/Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks The paper became the flagpole paper that every researcher reads first as the first initiation into the field of CR networks during the heyday of the CR networks. The paper had major impact as it is the first work which demonstrated the existence of optimal sensing parameters theoretically and developed the framework to support this optimality in real network environments. This paper identified the interference model for CR, well-motivated from the limitation of communication hardware that RF front-ends cannot differentiate between the transmissions of primary and secondary users. It developed a practical spectrum sensing solution, where an optimal observation time and a transmission time are determined to maximize sensing efficiency while satisfying interference limits.
The paper is the first research work that identifies the practical issues and derives possible solutions when extending the CR concept to cellular mobile networks. Specifically, this paper defined two mobility types in the CR cellular networks, user mobility and spectrum mobility.
Akyildiz and his PhD students coined the word “CRAHNs” for the first time in, which is used as a standard terminology by the research community in the meantime. Specifically, this paper looked at the network architectures, where multiple nodes are not associated with a single controller (hence, called CR ad hoc networks or CRAHNs).
Nanonetworks/Internet of NanoThings Akyildiz and his student Josep Miquel Jornet proposed for the first time and investigated the use of graphene to develop nano-antennas for electromagnetic (EM) communication in nanonetworks. This paper showed that, by using a narrow graphene nanoribbon (GNR), an antenna just a few hundreds of nanometers long and tens of nanometers wide could radiate EM waves in the Terahertz (THz) band (0.1-10 THz). This framework is used to characterize the propagation characteristics of Surface Plasmon Polariton (SPP) waves in graphene.
Akyildiz and Jornet also proposed a plasmonic nano-transceiver that intrinsically operate in the THz band in where the basic idea is based on the integration of III-V High-Electron-Mobility Transistors (HEMT) with graphene in. In 2016, a US Patent is obtained for this technology.
Akyildiz and Jornet also developed very large plasmonic nano-antenna Planar Array with 32x32 (in total of 1024) elements which is called'"Ultra-Massive MIMO communication systems" in and a patent was issued for this idea in 2017.
Molecular communication/Internet of BioNanoThings While nanonetworks do not operate based on radio frequency spectrums, they mainly exploit networking paradigms which are fundamentally different yet “wireless” such as molecular communication, where the information is coded and communicated by molecules as explored in and the term “Internet of BioNanoThings: was coined in the paper for the first time.
Akyildiz and his student Pierobon also developed one of the first realistic molecular communication channel models and capacity analysis for molecular communication in.
TeraHertz Band Communication Terahertz Band (0.1-10 THz) communication is envisioned as one of the key wireless technologies of the next decade. The THz band plans to help overcome the spectrum scarcity problems and capacity limitations of current wireless networks, by providing an unprecedentedly large bandwidth. In addition, THz-band communication will supposedly enable a plethora of applications ranging from instantaneous massive data transfer among nearby devices in Terabit Wireless Personal and Local Area Networks, to ultra-high-definition content streaming over mobile devices in 6G systems.
The THz-band channel was investigated in and the first channel model was developed for this almost unexplored frequency range. The peculiarities of the channel were captured by utilizing radiative transfer theory to account for the absorption from different types of gaseous molecules. In addition, he analytically calculated the channel capacity of the THz band for different medium compositions and power allocation schemes.
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces